Opinion

'How about he rings?': PM's woman problem hits peak farce

After hearing her public complaints of being bullied and intimidated, Scott Morrison invited the Liberal senator Lucy Gichuhi to his office in Parliament House. The newly installed Prime Minister asked her to recount her story.

"I told him everything," Gichuhi recalls. "After the leadership spill, I was ready to say everything that had happened. I saw adult women crying, even ministers. It was very, very tense. Scott said, 'Leave it with me'. They were the last words as I left him."

Illustration: John ShakespeareCredit:

That was three months ago. What has she heard back? "Nothing," she tells me. "I haven't heard anything back."

The government, says the senator from South Australia, has the wrong attitude. When her fellow Liberal MP, Julia Banks, said she'd been bullied, "instead of getting to the bottom of it to learn the problem, their attitude is 'Don't talk, just support us so we look good'".

Advertisement

And there was no shortage of material. Banks also made public complaints about her colleagues bullying and intimidating her during the Liberal leadership upheaval. She was so dispirited that she said in August that she would not stand for Parliament again.

Julia Banks in the House of Representatives, announcing her decision to quit the Liberal party and join the crossbench.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

And this week her complaints, unheeded, exploded. Banks announced that she would be quitting the Liberal Party and moving to sit on the crossbenches as an independent in the House of Representatives. Morrison's minority government just became even more minor.

When Banks had made her bombshell announcement just after noon on Tuesday, she returned to her office and found a text message from the Opposition Leader, Bill Shorten, on her phone: "Are you okay?"

Her own leader was trying to reach her through intermediaries, but it would be some hours before he succeeded. Morrison dispatched Treasurer Josh Frydenberg and Minister for Jobs and Minister for Women Kelly O'Dwyer to persuade her to visit his office.

"I won't be called to the headmaster's office," Banks told the emissaries. She reminded them of her office number. Morrison was welcome to visit. In the interim, Frydenberg offered to negotiate a package of government infrastructure spending and other sweeteners for her seat of Chisholm in return for her support in the House.

He called it a "Katter deal" after the $220 million that the government promised Bob Katter last month in irrigation and dam projects in return for his support for the government on votes of confidence and supply.

Illustration: Jim PavlidisCredit:

"Josh, no deals," Banks replied, though she later quipped that she should have asked for a dam in her Melbourne electorate. She was going to give the government support on votes of confidence and supply. She couldn't be part of the government but she wasn't about to bring it down. "I want the government to go full term."

There was still the little matter of the Prime Minister. Morrison wouldn't risk being caught by photographers walking the couple of hundred metres through the building to her office.Peak farce was achieved when an exasperated Frydenberg called Banks and said: "Julia, he's the Prime Minister!"

Banks: "I know who he is, Josh. Since he's the Prime Minister, how about he rings me?"Frydenberg: "So you'll talk to him if he calls you?"

"Let's give it a try and let's see."

Eventually they connect by phone. Morrison tells Banks that he hopes to have a professional relationship with her as a crossbench Member of Parliament. Then he gets to the sensitive bit: "I just want to go to your speech" in the House. Banks had said that the coup against Turnbull had been led by the "reactionary right of the party" in pursuit of "their power, their personal ambition".

She decried the way that both major parties run destructive point-scoring. She called for better respect for women across both main parties and equal representation for women and men as "an urgent imperative which will create a culture change". Morrison now wanted to know: "You don't have a problem with me, do you?" She replied only that everything she had to say had been said in her statement. Banks added: "It really shouldn't be a surprise."

During her Liberal Party preselection for the Victorian seat of Chisholm, one female preselector had asked Banks, a mother of two, who would mind her children while she was in Canberra when Parliament sat. When she explained that they were adults in their late teens, the Liberal preselector then wanted to know how old she was. Implication: if you're a woman with kids, you're either too young or too old to be a Member of Parliament. Banks is 56.

But she didn't have too much trouble winning preselection to contest the 2016 election. Chisholm was a hopeless case. Labor had held it for the previous 18 years. No important Liberal wanted it.At the first fundraising event of her campaign, she was told who would be making speeches. There were two male officials listed, state president Michael Kroger and an obscure local branch official. She wasn't on the list. "I'm the candidate; shouldn't I make a speech?"

"Don't you worry about that darling," said the local official. "We'll give you the raffle."

The party gave Banks scant support for her campaign, but the seat was a long shot. She shouldn't have expected too much. Tony Abbott did offer to campaign for her. Banks declined. Abbott wasn't a crowd pleaser, she decided. After that, the party actively discouraged other top Liberals like Julie Bishop and Marise Payne from campaigning for Banks. That seemed to be less about gender than faction, however. Banks was not in the dominant conservative faction, nor any faction for that matter. Sexism and faction are not separate matters in the Liberal Party, however, Banks says. "There is a real culture of backwardness on women and it's definitely entrenched in the conservative faction" of the Liberals, she tells me.

During the leadership strike on Malcolm Turnbull in August, Banks found herself being confronted by another MP. On the Thursday night before the decisive vote that installed Morrison, Banks was hosting quite a few of her colleagues in her Parliament House office. Late in the evening, in a doorway connecting the two halves of her office, she found herself face to face with Steve Irons, a West Australian MP. Not a conservative but a Morrison supporter. Banks was loyal to Turnbull.Banks later recounted to colleagues that Irons forcefully argued: ‘‘You have to vote for Scott. Don’t be an idiot. Turnbull’s gone. We’ll have Scott as PM. We can’t let Dutton win.’’Irons has a different memory. He says while he was in her office and asked her to vote for Morrison, he was not confrontational and did not raise his voice: ‘‘It’s not in my nature.’’

After Turnbull had been removed, Banks announced that she would not be contesting her seat at the next election. There'd been a lot of intimidation. At one point she'd even called the Federal Police to complain of harassment by some Victorian members of the conservative faction. But the political assassination of another prime minister was "the last straw", as she put it.

The new Prime Minister tried to mollify Banks. "Julia, we can get you away from all this, we're going to send you to New York" on a three-month, all-expenses paid parliamentary fellowship at the UN, said Morrison. She declined, sensing an effort to buy her silence. Morrison then offered to organise a parliamentary "pair" so she could take leave. "I'm not sick," was her blunt rejoinder. But at no point, after her August public outburst at bullying and intimidation, did anyone in the party or the government ask her about her experience.

After the Liberal rout in the Victorian state election last weekend, Frydenberg as the senior Victorian Liberal convened a meeting between Morrison and all the Victorian MPs and senators. Word leaked out that O'Dwyer had given a damningly blunt assessment - the public sees the Liberal Party as "homophobic, anti-women, climate change deniers". When Labor gleefully pursued O'Dwyer over this in question time, O'Dwyer put on a brave face and declared that the Liberals were the "natural party for women". There were hoots of derision from across the chamber.

Loading

O'Dwyer knew it was a hollow claim. Women make up a quarter of the Liberal parliamentarians, only about half the proportion of women in Labor. Despite her success in bringing down an economic security policy for women, O'Dwyer has had her own encounters with sexist bullying at the hands of Liberal colleagues.

And the Morrison inquiry? Two former party officials, Brian Loughnane and Chris McDiven, have been appointed to study the various state divisions of the party and review their processes for handling complaints with a view to coming up with a better overall system. No one is looking into any individual complaints. Lucy Gichuhi will be waiting a long time, it seems, for any real action in her case. Gichuhi says she's attracted to the Liberals as the party of enterprise, individuality and economic growth. "But it's like a rich family. What's the point of having a lot of income if everyone in the family is living in misery? We have to have economic success but social success is just as important. The Liberals have not made the effort to bring women to the table. It's an idea whose time has come." It really shouldn't be a surprise.